The majority of lessons in this course cover specific techniques that are effective in changing child behavior. The overall goal has been to help with the challenges of parenting and child rearing by providing specific tools you can really use and that research has shown to make a huge difference. In this lesson, I consider more general facets of family life that greatly influence child development and the behaviors in the home. As with other topics, many of these will be familiar but I hope we can add some new features that will be practical and improve the effects of what you already might be doing. Consider the overall theme of this lesson as creating a nurturing environment for the child in ways that are likely to set the stage for easier child rearing and parenting. There are all sorts of influences that might create a nurturing environment. I have selected eight and what can be done to help family life. Let me begin. First, it is important to promote good communication with your child as early as possible. Good communication, first in genuine exchanges in which you and your child talk to each other even more important listen to each other. The specific topic under discussion are not as important as developing and sustaining open lines of communication. Now most parents feel and say that their children can talk to him about anything. Yet while most children want to go to their parents about difficult topics they often shy away from actually doing that. They expect that when they raise the touchy subject the parent will respond with opinions, give directives about what the child should do, and moralize about something. It would be great if children could come to you more freely about difficult topics. Open lines of communication are important because it will help you identify any problems in their early stages and intervene if needed. Here are some things you can do to promote better communication. First, realize that telling your child that he or she can talk to you about anything will not open the lines of communication. Reassurance will not help at all because the child knows your views on many topics and the opinions you're likely to give. Second, be an especially good listener. This is easier said than done listening to promote good communication means paying close attention without jumping in or offering an opinion or judging what was just said. Of course, this is not true for every issue but the goal is to make open lines of communication and it's better to just listen to the full story before jumping in. As an example, once one of my teenage daughters came to me and asked if we could talk as if I were a friend rather than her dad. This caught me very much off guard, rather than try to convince her that I was her dad and not a friend I kept quiet. My daughter asking for a friend in me gently implied that I should just listen, not jump in with my usual comments, and keep my parental judgments to myself. I listened and she discussed some relationship issues at school; her thoughts about it, what was good, what was annoying and so on, nothing catastrophic and nothing out of the ordinary. She spoke for about 15 minutes. I recall nodding once in a while but not really saying anything. When she finished talking she got up from the chair, walked out of the room and said thanks and just left the room. Now I did not do very much. I just listened and apparently, that was really important at that moment. The larger point is important. Do what you can to really listen and to actually understand what you've heard and what's being said. And of course, you have all sorts of opinions and judgments, just try to delay in giving them. I'm not suggesting that you hold back your views. After all, you're responsible for teaching the child a lot yet to build better communication invest in better and longer listening. That will help enormously in opening up the lines of communication. A third thing you can do and maybe the most important is to be a model for open communication. What that means is that you model talking about yourself and sharing your day. Create opportunities to talk about your day, any stressors and what happened. If it fits your style, it would be useful to even have a regular routine. Maybe at dinner time when parents and children talk about things that happened during the day, what was interesting? What interaction occurred? What were the difficult situations? This does not have to be everyday but should have some regularity. The goal of modeling is to establish a family norm that we talk about things that happened during the day and what's happening in our lives. Again, this message is not going to be conveyed by simply saying we can talk about anything at the dinner table. Rather, the message will be conveyed by modeling, by showing exactly what you mean by talking about events of the day. That can go a long way toward fostering good communication at dinner and beyond. A second way to provide a nurturing environment is to build positive family connections with relatives outside the home. Of course, the quality of your relation to the child is the most critical. In addition, the quality of interactions with relatives living in the home and outside of the home can be of great value in promoting positive behavior in your child. If you live near relatives, try to promote child connection with one or more of them. Those relatives can exert a great positive influence by having another person to talk with and who cares about this child. Children with positive family connections do better in school and are less likely to show behavioral problems and clinical dysfunction as they get older. Here are some things you could do: If it's possible to promote these family connections regularly. Be sure your child is present, if you go visit a relative just make sure they're with you. Try directly visiting relatives. Regular visits are better even if they are only once in a while. Encourage a favorite relative or two to come to your house maybe even babysit. If relatives live too far away to regularly visit, more frequent sessions via computer and live interactions by the computer screen that can help too. The child's bonding to other relatives can readily help family life and adaptive child functioning in home and at school. Just a little bit more deliberate promotion of these can help your child a lot. A third focus for family life is to include routines and rituals. Routines and rituals refer to regular and predictable activities. By rituals. I do not necessarily mean anything religious but religious activities would certainly qualify. Rather, I mean activities in which there is an order of what is done and things unfold in expected ways. The quality of family life is greatly influenced by regularly scheduled activities that give structure to the week or the month or the year. Research suggest that it is the regularity of the activities that is important rather than the specific content of what those activities are. Having such routines and rituals helps reduce stress and anxiety among children and also helps children avoid some risky behaviors as they turn to the teenage years and become young adults. So here are some things you can do. As I mentioned routines and rituals do not have to be special events. They can be very much everyday activities as long as they involve your family and your child. Every Friday afternoon, for example, you might go food shopping or on Saturdays you have a pancake breakfast or you stop at a certain park when you come home from grandma's house. Any of these- a regular drive to get to a park or go to a baseball field and play for a bit or go for a walk. The regularity of that will be really important. Perhaps one day a week, maybe the same day, would help make this a very good routine. Aim for regularity and frequency but do not be so rigid that the routine becomes an additional source of pressure. Something once a week is totally fine. If you can have a couple of these regular activities that would be great. The nice thing is that regular events in your home and regular activities outside the home all qualify and they do not have to be special. A fourth focus is to promote positive social behavior especially early in childhood. By positive social behavior, I mean getting along with others, cooperating, being sensitive or responsive to others and just interacting harmoniously. Children vary greatly as do adults and their temperament and their propensity to socialize. Some children immediately join in with others, play, and start talking. Others are much more reticent and shy. There's no need to try to turn a shy child into an extrovert. At the same time, it is useful for children to learn to be around peers and to get along. There's more here than meets the eye. We know much from research that children who engage in positive social behaviors do better in their schoolwork and are also less likely to engage in disruptive behavior, bullying, substance abuse, and anything risky later on in their teens. Over the years, research has shown that these positive social behaviors are especially important early in life. To prepare children for entering school, for many years, the emphasis was on early exposure to academic activities such as learning how to read as early as possible. Reading is important of course but current views focus more on social behavior. That means preparing children for school by developing their ability to interact with others, to cooperate, to share, play nicely, and listen to adults. So, positive social behaviors are important early in life and their importance continues in elementary through high school years and of course in our adult lives as well. So here are some things you can do to help your child develop these social behaviors. Develop good relations with others as opportunities arise. If social relations come pretty easily to your child, it will not take much work for you to cultivate these skills. But look for ways to increase the number of opportunities for positive social behaviors, especially if they are not occurring often enough now, to reinforce and build on. A playdate, a sleep over, taking one of her friends with you on a family outing once in a while that might be all that is needed. Also, if there are neighbors to play with casually or other play opportunities that require a little arrangement, all the better. As your child engages in social interaction, monitor how your child is doing, especially with younger children. Parents almost always monitor for safety, but I'm talking about a different kind of attention as your child is playing. Do you see any problems in sharing and taking turns or being reasonable with other children? If you are seeing a repeated negative social behavior that you want to address try to prompt and then praise the behaviors you think that will be helpful. More generally, praise positive social actions as you see them because that will lock in. Remember, you have one of the most powerful tools and in our toolkit with you all the time and that's that very special type of phrase that we've talked about. Now if your child does not engage in social interaction very willingly, use antecedents to promote particular social behaviors. You shaping to develop small portions of the behaviors and use the special praise for the behaviors you believe will be good to develop given what you know about your child. You may need to help out a lot especially in the early stages. For example, by walking a younger child to the park and staying nearby when she plays might be just what helps get started on these social skills. Commands that you make such as just go over there play with those kids like everybody else. They're not very useful as prompts from many children, better to accompany your child and look for slight social behavior to reinforce, like playing near someone or handing another child a toy. Let your child be your guide as to where shaping begins. Even if your child is withdrawn and does not start up easily with others, you can still work on social relations. Start with a small dose rather than a full sleep over or a full four-hour play date. Shaping a little bit of social time together might be all that you need. If it still seems like a stretch for your child, have him select a friend to accompany all of you on a family outing to the beach or amusement park or whatever activities you enjoy. Your child and his friend will be together but your child has the security of your presence and you begin a process of shaping what will eventually lead to more independence socialization without you so close by. Another way to help build positive social relations is to develop one or more competencies in a child that involve or eventually will evolve activities with other people. It is useful to help your child develop some skill or interest or talent that can continue over many years and pay dividends in social interactions. In relation to social behavior and not all activities are equal. Some are more likely to promote interactions and connections with other people over time. For example, learning to play a musical instrument has the time by oneself to practice but the skill brings the child into contact with other children and lessons, recitals, perhaps the school orchestra and maybe a little band in high school or in adulthood. Other arts, such as theater and dance and sports such as gymnastics or baseball may do the same thing in terms of building competence and fostering social behavior along the way. You and your child will naturally participate in activities you enjoy. But among the possible choices, give special considerations to those that involve activities that are likely to be more social over time and that are likely to be lifelong or near so. A fifth component for developing a nurturing environment is fostering flexibility in your home. Now flexibility refers to openness to change and compromise. And I'm talking about your own flexibility more than I'm talking about the flexibility of the child. Now flexibility can be difficult to accomplish in running a home. There are so many things that cannot be flexible. You've got to get a child out the door on time for school. You have to ensure that the meals are there, everyone's homework is done and so on. But by flexible I mean trying to compromise when you can and more and more as your child gets older and starts expressing preferences. The other extreme would be to have clear and rigid statements. Do this because I said so that's a move in a wrong direction for a nurturing environment. From the lesson on antecedents, you know that such statements that are forcing people to what to do actually fosters oppositional behavior and more noncompliance. And you know from this course that offering choice fosters compliance. Efforts to compromise lead to more positive interactions overall and increase your ability to get compliance when compromising on a given topic is not possible. Here are some things you can do: First, compromise and let some things go when you can. Consider bedtime, curfew, a messy room, strange personal appearance are these areas you might be able to give in a little? It'd be great if you could. In the pre-teen years and the teen years, torn jeans, orange hair in the style of the Statue of Liberty, and saying the word like five times in every sentence, can you give in on some of these? That would be a good place to start. Second and related for your teenager, negotiate at times when people are calm. Invite your pre-teen or teen to help problem solve with you, for example, perhaps curfew is an issue with some upcoming social event, can you two sit and discuss this and maybe calmly reach a compromise. If you can, include your child in the process, make up new rules whenever they're coming up in the home and that will go very far in setting the tone and reaching solutions you both can live with. Sixth, monitor the whereabouts of your child and the use of computers, smartphones, and other devices. Monitoring means keeping track of where your child is and what he or she is doing and who's he with. Monitoring is most important for physical safety in the early years. Obviously, you do not want your toddler running into the street or going off with strangers. But monitoring also plays a very large role in your child's adjustment, particularly in the pre-teen and the teen years and is an important influence on development. Whether your children are monitored relates to behavior problems that they show and experience. Teens who are monitored are much less likely to engage in sexual activity, illicit drug use, and other high risk behaviors. One area where monitoring frequently comes up is after school time, which can be difficult to keep track of if both parents are at work. It's even more difficult for a single parent. Yet, you do need to know where your child is after school, who is he with and what's he actually doing? I mention that adolescents who are not monitored are more likely to engage in all sorts of risky behavior. Add to that, the lack of supervision after school is associated with greater depression and poor grades among adolescents. So, this is the 21st century and monitor your child is more complex because this extends beyond where your child actually is. So, monitor the use of computer, smartphones, tablets, and other such devices. Children can now readily access sites on the internet that you would not approve of such as pornography and they can engage in activities that promote problem behaviors such as video games that focus on violence. Also, they can get caught up in online bullying. It's important now to monitor your child in the real world but also in the virtual world where the child is engaging in computer activities that are not homework. So here are some things you can do. Establish early in the child life that we all routinely know where everyone is. As your child is developing, make it natural to ask you about activities at the dinner table let's say, where everyone was, and what they did during the day. Monitoring will not work if all of a sudden when your child hits age 12 you develop a new intense interest in her whereabouts that takes the form of verbal waterboarding. Have your child check in when he or she reaches the cell phone age and checking periodically with them if there's any possibly they're not exactly where you think. A second thing you can do is to make your home a place where your child can bring friends while you are there. That of course allows for careful monitoring. Finally, come up with an agreeable way to monitor the use of computers, cell phones, and tablets. Can you see or check what your child is doing at the computer? It's important to be able to do that. Placing a child's computer in a public place like the living room where parents can easily see that is a solution but that won't always work. Seventh consideration for providing a nurturing environment is to manage and minimize sources of stress for your child. A stress is a normal part of everyday life and it's not something that can be completely eliminated. Yet there are some important things to say about stress. First, be alert to stressors of your child. Children and adolescents experience considerable stress and all of this can become especially high during adolescence. Common stressors they experience: demands from schoolwork, unsafe living conditions, unstable home environment, bullying, concerns about body image and weight control, overly high expectations, and negative thoughts and doubts about themselves. Two points to make about stressors that might be especially interesting. First, research suggests that parents are usually unaware of the stress experienced by their children in adolescence. Children often turn inward and just say that things are fine but they actually are suffering quietly. Yet national surveys show that youth in fact are considerably stressed. Now another key feature to note is that parent stress tends to spread throughout the home. Thus, when you are stressed your children become stressed by those factors. By that I mean they become more stressed than they normally would be if you were not stressed. This can have two effects. First, the child has increased stress. The child has his or her own stress and now a little bit of yours. Also, stress is a setting event, an antecedent that can lead to negative behavior. When you are stressed, you come home after work and say something, it's likely your child will not comply. I already mentioned that. That's because the stress in your voice is an antecedent for getting noncompliance. That extra stress in your voice comes across and stresses your child. A second effect of what can happen is that that stress is actually an antecedent for other things that may happen in the child's life such as not sleeping well at home at night or having problems at school the next day. Stressors are always around. It's when they're continuous they disrupt routines and that's when they increase noncompliance and can add more anxiety. But here are some things you can do. Again, stress is part of normal life. It's important to be aware of it. You can start by making sure your child is not getting an overdose of it in the form of prolonged household conflict, belittling and dismissive comments, harsh and frequent punishment or unreasonable levels of family chaos. In any life there will be crisis, such a divorce, moving the child away from friends and a familiar school, bouncing back and forth in joint custody and the like. These can be very stressful. Try to be as comforting and understanding as possible and keep activities, routines, and rituals as consistent as possible so they are like what they were before the crisis or stressful event. We know from research that keeping the child in the usual routine helps to manage stress. So, if stress disrupts some family life in some way try to maintain all daily routines that you can and get back as soon as possible to the regular meals, school schedule, bedtime ritual. All that can help stabilize child behavior. Eight and as a final strategy to develop a nurturing environment, remember try to stay sane yourself and be careful about your own stress. It is very important to take care of yourself and that's not just a cliche. We have learned a great deal about stress in recent years and much of that may be surprising. I mentioned how stress you experience can influence child behavior but we know so much more than that. Stress can speed up the aging process. This has been shown at the cellular level in our bodies. Also, continued stress can change our immune system so we do not fight off infection and handle inflammation very well. The changes in the immune system can be enduring and make us more vulnerable to serious disease such as cancer and heart disease and chronic respiratory diseases. Now none of this has to be alarming but it does add to what we know and makes it even more important to do things to manage your own stress. This course focuses on child development and what can be done to help child functioning at home and at school. You taking care of your stress and managing that is an important contribution to all of that. So here are some things you can do. It is important that you see to your own needs and not just your child's by building your own downtime or social interaction and your own special routines. Perhaps you and your spouse or partner and friends have special time that you get together. Invest a little energy in yourself. It will pay off for your family and you will also be modeling for your child the importance of taking care of oneself, a skill you'd like your child to learn. You are the best judge of what influences help you remain sane in a complex world. One person may find gardening, another playing in a band, another volunteering or taking a long walk. You are grown up and I would not presume to tell you how to take care of yourself. But the usual solutions may be helpful, such as building positive relations outside the home. If you are in a relationship, preserving from relationship time just for yourself, commitment to a hobby, exercise, involvement in religious and non-religious groups. You know what to do. But is important to make sure they're in your everyday life. Just be alert here on stress. As the airplane safety instructors, instructions remind us you'll be a lot more used to your loved ones, if you put the oxygen mask on your own face first and then on your children's face. So, let me summarize the focus of this lesson. We've been talking about the context or broad influences on child rearing and development. While there are many factors to consider, I focused on a few that will influence child behavior and functioning in the home. I also mentioned quite specific things you can do if you wish to add to what you already doing as part of your home life. Now many of the contextual influence affect the level of problem behaviors you have to deal with and your need to draw on the special tools to change and manage child behavior. These influences affect the overall climate of the home. They're not a substitute for developing specific behaviors, but they will make that task much less challenging. Rituals and routines will make it so less difficult then getting your child to bed or getting your child to do homework. Yet these influences will definitely help even though they're not as specific as the behavior change tools we've talked about.
